Pushing kids to read, against the odds
Long ago, I used to take two little boys to our town library. Poking around among the stacks, I’d turn to show them something, and see … empty air. I’d peer around, then hear shouts through the door. They’d crept away and were whizzing by on their scooters.
My mother always brought us home bags of books from the local library, especially in summer, or she’d take us along to choose our own. We were also read to, including while potty training. My brother only wanted the same book, every day. I can still hear the words: “Anatole wanted a donkey, a sweet and gentle donkey … .” I can hear the words from many books, from “Little Bear” to “Are You My Mother?”, and how my mother would choke up when she read “Mrs. Malone,” about an old woman who had nothing but took in hurt or cold birds and animals. My parents took turns reading “The Hobbit” aloud.
As kids, my siblings — two other girls and a boy — and I read. My favorite was “A Little Princess,” by Francis Hodgson Burnet, about the brave and imaginative Sara Crewe. Then there were “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Harriet the Spy” and all the Little House books. The Narnia chronicles, the Borrowers series, the Wolves Chronicles; and I went through a huge phase of pioneer books, including the whole library shelf of William O. Steele books for boys.
Of course, I wanted my boys to love to read. But there was a problem. They didn’t want to sit still.
“Your boys are not readers,” my mother, a former teacher, often said, reminding me of the importance of reading and its central role in academic success. So I kept trying.
They did like to be read to at bedtime, especially when little. Roy, my younger one, for a time wanted to hear “Pumpkin Soup” over and over. My husband, Mike, read them “The Indian in the Cupboard,” “The Boy and the Dragon” and even “Winter Danger,” an old Steele book I still somehow had. I read some Harry Potter books aloud. When our older boy, Teddy, was 8 or 9, the two of us took a trip and listened enthralled to “The Other Side of the Mountain,” about a boy who leaves home to live in a hollow tree.
Yet mostly the boys were too much in love with scooters, bikes and motion to stop and read. Once they got to high school, and had sports and student council (and computers and video games), they really read little extra.
Yet every Christmas I bought them books, and they always joked about “all those books you always gave us and we never read.”
I resorted to tricks. I put appealing-looking books (containing mayhem) and bookmarks in the fronthall bathroom. Next thing I knew, a bookmark would move down through the pages.
I bribed and withheld. Each summer, the boys wanted to go to mountainbike races, entailing transportation, lodging or camping, and fees. I said I’d take them — if we listened to audio books. Roy and friends soon declared “The Road” by Cormac Mccarthy the best book they’d ever read.
The rest of the deal was three books off the school summer reading list. Both boys were big on Steinbeck — “The Red Pony,” “Cannery Row” and “Tortilla Flats” — because those books were quick. One day, Roy closed “Half Broke Horses,” about a female rancher in the early 1900s, saying, “This was awesome.”
One day, just after his junior year in college, Teddy — now Ted — said in the car, “I’m going to tell you something, and I don’t want you to make a big deal of it, OK?”
I nodded, holding still. “I want to start reading more books,” he said. “I think it’s the best way to be a smarter person.”
He asked if I would pick him up some library books. He knew I’d jump.
Last winter holidays, the day before he was to fly back to his job in New York, Ted asked for a book: maybe, he suggested, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The year before, my mother had mentioned that he might like the tale of the Spanish Civil War and the heroic bridge dynamiter.
I dashed to the bookcase, threw the faded 500-page volume into his arms. His face fell.
“I was hoping,” he said sheepishly, “it’d be a little smaller.”
He read it, though, over some weeks — and then called to talk about the ending, which is haunting.
Books transport me. They connect me in conversation with both friends and people I barely knew. Readers — whether of books or current events — always have something to talk about.
My mother, at 87, is in three book clubs. As my sister Lucy (also a teacher) puts it, our mother “got four out of four — 100 percent” in her children by modeling and advocating.
I have achieved 50 percent participation so far. But my other son, now in college, is briefly home before a job. He plans to relax, bike, see friends.
“Who knows, Mom,” he says. “I might even read a book or two.”